Five Books We’re Excited to Read This February

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Our prescription for the winter weary? Pour your libation of choice and curl up with a good read. The coming month offers plenty of temptations, including new works by some of our favourite authors. But start now — you’ve only got 28 days of reading til March roars in with even more great books.

 

Still Life With Bread Crumbs by Anna Quindlen

Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Anna Quindlen, whose last book was her memoir Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake, returns to fiction to explore later life romance in her seventh novel, Still Life with Breadcrumbs. In it, New York photographer Rebecca Winter, a feminist icon, finds herself at a crossroads in her life. Nearing sixty, divorced and with limited income, she knows she needs to make some changes.  Decamping to a cottage upstate, she seeks new inspiration for her work, but finds the possibility of unexpected love.

 

The Two Sisters of Borneo by Ian Hamilton

The next installment in the entertaining series about accountant/kick-ass investigator Ava Lee, finds our hero in Hong Kong establishing a new investment company. But trouble follows when she needs to investigate problems one of their clients, a furniture company in Borneo, is having with a Dutch customer. Of course, Ava’s business life is rarely contained by the boardroom, or even the norms of corporate etiquette, and soon she is dealing with gangs of thugs and mysterious strangers.

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The Museum of Extraordinary Things by Alice Hoffman

Most recently known for The Dovekeepers (which will be adapted into a television miniseries) Alice Hoffman delivers an fantastical tale of love and magic, set in New York during the first decades of the twentieth century. Coralie was raised on Coney Island, living a uniquely sheltered existence as the mermaid at her father’s Museum of Extraordinary Things. One night, she stumbles upon Eddie Cohen taking photographs in the woods and she is drawn out of her small world of illusions and trickery and into the electric, tumultuous world of Manhattan.

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The Forever Girl by Alexander McCall Smith

The prolific author, probably best known for his No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency series, explores the nature of human emotion in his new stand alone novel. The Forever Girl is about the many kinds of love: from first love, to true love, to unrequited love. The story begins on a small Caribbean island, with a young girl, Clover, falling in love with her best friend, James, as her mother realizes she has fallen out of love with her husband and that another man is interested in her.

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The Troop by Nick Cutter

The end of the month brings a tale, whose subtitle is the ominous “A Novel of Terror.” (It should be noted that Cutter is actually Giller-nominated author Craig Davidson writing under a pseudonym.) The premise is entirely rooted in a good old-fashioned horror story: a small scout troop is on their annual trip to a small island off Prince Edward Island. Things take a turn into the truly terrifying when a man who looks like he’s starving to death intrudes on their camp. He is actually the host for a vicious bioengineered tapeworm that starts to spread, triggering a harrowing struggle for survival. Be forewarned, Stephen King himself said, “The Troop scared the hell of of me…not for the faint-hearted.”

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